Meanwhile, we all know that Ron Paul supports Putin and his war crimes, particularly the hostile takeover of Ukraine that he has embarked upon, not to mention the shooting down of a Malaysian flight, but now, Russia is getting ready to starve it's own people...

...so yep, Ron Paul and his supporters have plenty of "dead baby" blood on their hands, and no posts about RP's voting record makes a damned difference, because in reality, he is just as, or even more guilty as any other politician, despite the brainwashed racists commentary here of the Zappa forum.

Ya'll better get some more popcorn up in here, it's about to get real stupid with brainwashed Ron Paul supporters...

The libertarian godfather has become one of the biggest cheerleaders for the "referendum" that will lead to Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula.

In the Crimea crisis, it seems Ron Paul thinks that libertarianism stops at water’s edge.

The former Republican congressman and libertarian icon has long enjoyed a mixed reputation in the United States. While many admire Paul for his small government views on civil liberties, other shy away from a politician who has criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and allowed a series of racist and conspiratorial news letters to be published under his own name.

However, the former congressman whose presidential bids in 2008 and 2012 helped elevate libertarians from a political afterthought to a key constituency in the Republican Party and whose son, Rand Paul is poised for a 2016 bid for the White House, has now started a new chapter of his career. He's defending the chauvinist and imperialist Russian regime of President Vladimir Putin.

Over the past several weeks, Paul has become one of the most vocal American supporters of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea, a semi-autonomous region of Ukraine. In the aftermath of a revolution that drove out its ally in Kiev, Viktor Yanukovych, Moscow is attempting to annex the province by holding a “referendum” Sunday in hopes that it will provide a patina of legality to its blatantly illegal land grab. Paul, long a foe of military action and democracy promotion efforts overseas, has not been content to limit himself to criticisms of American policies in Eastern Europe. He has gone out of his way to legitimize and justify the actions of Putin.

“He’s no angel but actually he has some law on his side,” Paul said earlier this week on the Fox Business Network. “They have contracts and agreements and treaties for a naval base there and the permission to go about that area.” While Russia has leased its naval base from the Ukrainian government in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol until 2042, the terms of that agreement explicitly prohibit Russian forces from leaving their barracks, never mind overrunning and occupying government buildings, violating Ukraine’s airspace, and taking over border posts.

It is for this reason that the 20,000 or so Russian forces now spread out across the peninsula, harassing journalists and threatening anyone else who protests their presence there, are not wearing Russian uniforms; according to Moscow, these men are “local self-defense forces,” not Russian soldiers. This is a lie, and only the most slavish of Russian propagandists are claiming otherwise.

Russia’s actions also violate the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which it signed along with the United Kingdom and the United States, committing all parties “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine” in exchange for Kiev’s transferring its then-considerable post-Soviet nuclear weapons stockpile to Moscow.

Paul and his supporters used to complain that the American media and political establishment never gave him a fair shake in his various presidential campaigns, so it is a little odd to see him and his denizens providing a democratic gloss to Sunday’s “referendum” on Crimea’s status. The referendum on the Crimea is happening quite literally at gunpoint as Russian forces have occupied the entire peninsula and offers no option for Crimeans to maintain their current status within the Ukraine. Instead, voters can either vote to allow Russia to annex the peninsula or "reunification of Crimea with Russia" in the parlance of the ballot or to "restore the 1992 Constitution and the status of Crimea as a part of Ukraine." (Early exit polls show 93% of Crimean voters chose to join Russia.)

The referendum—which has been denounced as illegal by outside observers, including the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe—was only scheduled by the Crimean parliament after armed men occupied that body in late February. Those gunmen installed a pro-Russian figurehead as the region's Prime Minister, as well—a guy named Sergey Aksyonov, the alleged criminal leader of a miniscule pro-Russian political party which has never earned more than 4% at the polls.

But for Ron Paul and the acolytes at his think tank, a motley crew of Putin apologists and admirers of post-Soviet thugs, Sunday’s sham election is all about the spirit of 1776. He recently wrote that "The only question that remains is whether there will there be an honest election, and I don’t see any reason there can’t be.” He did this on the website of his Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, which, in light of current events might be better called the Ron Paul Institute for Russian Aggression and Economic Exploitation (Its director, Daniel McAdams, has referred to the American ambassador to Ukraine as an “outlaw.”)

Paul bases his support of the Crimean referendum on libertarian grounds, as if what’s happening half a world away under the watchful eyes of the Russian military is akin to a Tea Party protest demanding less federal control over education policy. “There should be a right of secession,” Paul said on Fox. One cannot consider Paul’s defense of the Crimean “secession” without first becoming familiar with his nostalgia for the American one.

A crucial element of Paul’s worldview and that of his paleoconservative brethren is that America began to go to hell in a hand-basket with the Union victory in the American Civil War. Abraham Lincoln’s firm use of executive power to crush the slaveholding states’ attempt to secede initiated, in their view, the centralization of federal government power that continues to this day. The 1992 issue of the Ron Paul Survival Report (the name of which was a deliberate appeal to the then burgeoning far-right “survivalist” movement preparing for racial apocalypse) stated that “the right of secession should be ingrained in a free society” and that “there is nothing wrong with loosely banding together small units of government. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we too should consider it.” Ironically, while Paul was applauding Ukrainian independence 20 years ago, he is now cheering the Crimea’s forcible reintegration into Russia.

In addition to whitewashing Russian aggression, Paul depicts some of the most benign elements of America’s overseas involvement as nefarious and illegitimate. “The evidence is pretty clear that the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] financed by our government have been agitating with billions of dollars, trying to get that government changed,” he told The Guardian. “Our hands are not clean.”

By this, Paul was referring to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a U.S.-government funded, independently operated grant-making institution that supports civil society organizations in authoritarian states as well as emerging democracies. It enjoys bipartisan support, but has long been a target of Paul and other American isolationists, who see malevolence in everything their government does. Paul’s belief that America was trying to orchestrate “regime change” in Ukraine goes back to at least 2004, when he railed against supposed NED “meddling” in the 2004 presidential election that Yanukovych attempted to steal. (For the curious, here’s a list of NED grantees in Ukraine, which range from a “weekly youth journal” to election monitoring outfits).

To be sure, Yanukovych’s election theft was exposed and resisted by some U.S. and European government-funded civil society organizations, which would scarcely be able to exist without outside support. Why Americans should be outraged about this is something Paul neglects to answer.

There is an irony in a so-called “libertarian” defending the likes of Vladimir Putin. Ron Paul and his ilk claim to support individual rights, free markets, and a foreign policy of non-violence, yet here they are defending a man who hounds gays, presides over a kleptocratic mafia state, and invades his neighbors. Paul shirks the label of “isolationist,” preferring instead that of, “non-interventionist,” which is true only in the sense that he opposes interventionism—of even the non-violent sort—undertaken by the United States and its democratic allies. When it comes to violent Russian intervention in the affairs of its sovereign neighbors, however, Paul agrees with none other than former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who said that Moscow retains a “sphere of privileged interests” among the ex-vassal states of the Soviet Union. Why would a formerly elected official in America lend ideological cover to a foreign dictator’s assault on the basic human rights of his own people?

Meanwhile, tweedle-dumb STILL misquotes, misrepresents and vilifies Ron Paul, despite STILL not understanding his platform from a hole in the wall. And in light of all of this, he STILL actually thinks he's correct...

Looks like Ron Paul isn't alone in his support of Russia's pro-war activities...

Quote:

Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul: Apologists for Putin

As Vladimir Putin’s tanks begin to roll forth from Russia like Sauron’s legions from Mordor, a pair of American villains is working hard to undermine our resolve against the greatest threat from Europe to American values and power, and indeed to world peace, since Adolf Hitler.

Evgeny Feldman, a photographer for the maverick Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, recently visited a book store in Moscow and tweeted a photograph from amongst its shelves. Among volumes on one topical shelf such as The Crimes of the U.S.A. and The Third World War and Forward to Victory, in which authors offered bloodthirsty attacks on America and her values and called for its obliteration, one tome stood out. Emblazoned on its cover was the Russian title Прокончит с ФРС by an author identified as Рон Пол.

This was a Russian translation of 2009′s End the Fed by former Texas congressman and presidential primary contender Ron Paul, latched onto by Russian nationalists as an admission by an American that America is a fundamentally evil country leading the world down a path that leads to global ruin.

Days earlier another former U.S. presidential primary contestant, Pat Buchanan of the disgraced Nixon administration, published an opinion column in which he asked, seemingly on behalf of the Russian Kremlin: “How Would We Feel If Putin Told Us What To Do?” Sounding just like Neville Chamberlain, Buchanan viciously attacked Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for proposing legislation standing up to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Georgia, and urged the U.S. to simply ignore Putin’s bloodthirsty reign of terror there.

Paul and Buchanan are two individuals who have been decisively repudiated — humiliated, really — at the polls by the people of the United States. More than two-thirds of the American population currently views Russia as an enemy, precisely as Mitt Romney said during the last presidential campaign, and major magazine covers bluntly and dramatically reflect the nation’s horror at Putin’s aggression. Indeed, signs of it are everywhere.

Yet the likes of Paul and Buchanan continue to beat the drum of appeasement and indeed collaboration with Putin’s evil, neo-Soviet regime. Time magazine called End the Fed a “curious mix of the sensible and the delusional” and said that it teaches nothing about economics but much about what goes on inside Paul’s skull. The same can be said of Buchanan. Both men mix tiny bits of truth with great tidal waves of delusion to come up with policies that obliterate American values and world leadership and leave the field to despotic tyrants like Putin in the belief that nothing can touch Fortress America, which should simply watch the world burn.

Siding with Corker, Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi shows by his deeds that he knows Buchanan and Paul don’t represent sensible American policy. He recently fired off a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding that he investigate Putin lackey Mikhail Lesin, who has been feverishly buying up U.S. real estate with funds looted via all manner of corruption. Lesin could be viewed as Putin’s Goebbles, deeply tied to the Kremliln’s English-language propaganda apparatus and struggling furiously to divide the U.S. from its allies and blunt American resolve on Ukraine and Georgia.

In the Crimea crisis, it seems Ron Paul thinks that libertarianism stops at water’s edge.

The former Republican congressman and libertarian icon has long enjoyed a mixed reputation in the United States. While many admire Paul for his small government views on civil liberties, other shy away from a politician who has criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and allowed a series of racist and conspiratorial news letters to be published under his own name.

However, the former congressman whose presidential bids in 2008 and 2012 helped elevate libertarians from a political afterthought to a key constituency in the Republican Party and whose son, Rand Paul is poised for a 2016 bid for the White House, has now started a new chapter of his career. He's defending the chauvinist and imperialist Russian regime of President Vladimir Putin.

Over the past several weeks, Paul has become one of the most vocal American supporters of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea, a semi-autonomous region of Ukraine. In the aftermath of a revolution that drove out its ally in Kiev, Viktor Yanukovych, Moscow is attempting to annex the province by holding a “referendum” Sunday in hopes that it will provide a patina of legality to its blatantly illegal land grab. Paul, long a foe of military action and democracy promotion efforts overseas, has not been content to limit himself to criticisms of American policies in Eastern Europe. He has gone out of his way to legitimize and justify the actions of Putin.

“He’s no angel but actually he has some law on his side,” Paul said earlier this week on the Fox Business Channel. “They have contracts and agreements and treaties for a naval base there and the permission to go about that area.” While Russia has leased its naval base from the Ukrainian government in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol until 2042, the terms of that agreement explicitly prohibit Russian forces from leaving their barracks, never mind overrunning and occupying government buildings, violating Ukraine’s airspace, and taking over border posts.

It is for this reason that the 20,000 or so Russian forces now spread out across the peninsula, harassing journalists and threatening anyone else who protests their presence there, are not wearing Russian uniforms; according to Moscow, these men are “local self-defense forces,” not Russian soldiers. This is a lie, and only the most slavish of Russian propagandists are claiming otherwise.

Russia’s actions also violate the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which it signed along with the United Kingdom and the United States, committing all parties “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine” in exchange for Kiev’s transferring its then-considerable post-Soviet nuclear weapons stockpile to Moscow.

Paul and his supporters used to complain that the American media and political establishment never gave him a fair shake in his various presidential campaigns, so it is a little odd to see him and his denizens providing a democratic gloss to Sunday’s “referendum” on Crimea’s status. The referendum on the Crimea is happening quite literally at gunpoint as Russian forces have occupied the entire peninsula and offers no option for Crimeans to maintain their current status within the Ukraine. Instead, voters have they can either vote to allow Russia to annex the peninsula or "reunification of Crimea with Russia" in the parlance of the ballot or to "restore the 1992 Constitution and the status of Crimea as a part of Ukraine." (Early exit polls show 93% of Crimean voters chose to join Russia.)

The referendum -- which has been denounced as illegal by outside observers, including the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- was only scheduled by the Crimean parliament after that armed men occupied that body in late February. Those gunmen installed a pro-Russian figurehead as the region's Prime Minister, as well – a guy named Sergey Aksyonov, the alleged criminal leader of a miniscule pro-Russian political party which has never earned more than 4% at the polls.

But for Ron Paul and the acolytes at his think tank, a motley crew of Putin apologists and admirers of post-Soviet thugs, Sunday’s sham election is all about the spirit of 1776. He recently wrote that "The only question that remains is whether there will there be an honest election, and I don’t see any reason there can’t be.” He did this on the website of his Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, which, in light of current events might be better called Ron Paul Institute for Russian Aggression and Economic Exploitation (Its director, Daniel McAdams, has referred to the American ambassador to Ukraine as an “outlaw.”)

Paul bases his support of the Crimean referendum on libertarian grounds, as if what’s happening half a world away under the watchful eyes of the Russian military is akin to a Tea Party protest demanding less federal control over education policy. “There should be a right of secession,” Paul said on Fox. One cannot consider Paul’s defense of the Crimean “secession” without first becoming familiar with his nostalgia for the American one.

A crucial element of Paul’s worldview and that of his paleoconservative brethren is that America began to go to hell in a hand-basket with the Union victory in the American Civil War. Abraham Lincoln’s firm use of executive power to crush the slaveholding states’ attempt to secede initiated, in their view, the centralization of federal government power that continues to this day. The 1992 issue of the Ron Paul Survival Report (the name of which was a deliberate appeal to the then burgeoning far-right “survivalist” movement preparing for racial apocalypse) stated that “the right of secession should be ingrained in a free society” and that “there is nothing wrong with loosely banding together small units of government. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we too should consider it.” Ironically, while Paul was applauding Ukrainian independence 20 years ago, he is now cheering the Crimea’s forcible reintegration into Russia.

In addition to whitewashing Russian aggression, Paul depicts some of the most benign elements of America’s overseas involvement as nefarious and illegitimate. “The evidence is pretty clear that the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] financed by our government have been agitating with billions of dollars, trying to get that government changed,” he told The Guardian. “Our hands are not clean.”

By this, Paul was referring to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a U.S.-government funded, independently operated grant-making institution that supports civil society organizations in authoritarian states as well as emerging democracies. It enjoys bipartisan support, but has long been a target of Paul and other American isolationists, who see malevolence in everything their government does. Paul’s belief that America was trying to orchestrate “regime change” in Ukraine goes back to at least 2004, when he railed against supposed NED “meddling” in the 2004 presidential election that Yanukovych attempted to steal. (For the curious, here’s a list of NED grantees in Ukraine, which range from a “weekly youth journal” to election monitoring outfits).

To be sure, Yanukovych’s election theft was exposed and resisted by some U.S. and European government-funded civil society organizations, which would scarcely be able to exist without outside support. Why Americans should be outraged about this is something Paul neglects to answer.

There is an irony in a so-called “libertarian” defending the likes of Vladimir Putin. Ron Paul and his ilk claim to support individual rights, free markets, and a foreign policy of non-violence, yet here they are defending a man who hounds gays, presides over a kleptocratic mafia state, and invades his neighbors. Paul shirks the label of “isolationist,” preferring instead that of, “non-interventionist,” which is true only in the sense that he opposes interventionism – of even the non-violent sort – undertaken by the United States and its democratic allies. When it comes to violent Russian intervention in the affairs of its sovereign neighbors, however, Paul agrees with none other than former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who said that Moscow retains a “sphere of privileged interests” among the ex-vassal states of the Soviet Union. Why would a American elected official would lend ideological cover to a foreign dictator’s assault on the basic human rights of his own people?

Ron Paul's non-answer about his racist attitudes towards black Americans during the New Hampshire GOP debate was a classic evasion. It was also a virtual admission of guilt.

Akin to a man on trial for murdering his wife--but who insists on talking about how he is a good father--Ron Paul is unable to explain away the racist screeds in his newsletters, opposition to honoring Dr. King with a national holiday, and belief that the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 should be overturned because black folks' freedom is an imposition on white people's liberty.

Ron Paul is also a beneficiary of a cult of personality. With such status comes a reservoir of good faith among his public. To their eyes, the libertarian messiah could not possibly be a racist, for that would involve some reflection about the relationship between libertarian approaches to government in theory, and how in practice said philosophy enables white supremacy.

In all, if Ron Paul were a private citizen this would be a non-issue: his name is on the masthead of a newsletter which has repeatedly featured racist editorials; he cashes the checks from the subscribers to this newsletter; he believes that Civil Rights legislation is tyrannical towards whites; white supremacists have endorsed his works; his son, also an elected official,shares the same attitudes about sacrificing the full citizenship of black Americans to a "higher principle."

Check and mate.

Ron Paul's defenders have twisted themselves into all sorts of knots as they try to white wash these inconvenient facts. Their most common claim is that because Ron Paul supports ending the ruinous War on Drugs (with its well documented racial disparities in enforcement, imprisonment, and punishment), that he is a believer in racial equality. This is a symptom of a larger dynamic at work in post-Civil Rights era racial discourse

Primarily, the bar for what constitutes racism has been set so high that even the most obvious examples of racial animus have to be couched in careful terms lest an "innocent" white person be branded a bigot. Second, the definition of what constitutes "racism" has been narrowed down to include only bogeyman and caricatures of White wickedness, White hate, White sheets, White race pride tattoos, White hands holding nooses, and White hands burning crosses. And as an auxiliary-enabler of post-Civil Rights race discourse, the lazy newspeak of "playing the race card" was invented precisely to serve as a defense mechanism that exists only to enable such specious concepts as "white oppression" or "reverse racism."

Of course, real life is much more complicated. Here, the argument that Ron Paul is not a racist because he wants to end the War on Drugs is a logical fallacy. Racist people can support policies that are "race neutral." Racists can be "good people." Anti-racists and progressives can be forward thinking in some areas and unrepentant bigots in others. And of course, while many are loathe to admit it, racism is a sin of both liberals and conservatives alike.

As I am so fond of saying, history is once more our greatest teacher. For example, there were abolitionists who wanted to end slavery and the vile trade in human beings, yet who also thought that black Americans were subhuman. There were abolitionists who urged blacks to rise up against the evils of the Southern slaveocracy, yet these same people thought that the presence of Africans in America was a problem to be solved by colonization because their presence was antithetical to white democracy.

Hinton Rowan Helper was one such figure. His 1868 work, "The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It", was second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin in its influence on the public imagination about the evils of chattel slavery. Helper was also an unrepentant white supremacist.

For example, in his compendium "The Negroes in Negroland", he included such observations as:

In every part of the United States, there is a broad and impassable line of demarcation between every man who has one drop of African blood in his veins, and every other class in the community. The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of society, — prejudices which neither refinement, nor argument, nor education, nor religion itself, can subdue, — mark the people of color, whether bond or free, as the subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable. The African in this'country belongs by birth to the very lowest station in society; and from that station he can never rise, be his talents, his enterprise, his virtues what they may." — African Repository , Vol. IV., page 118.

Even more pithy, Helper included how:

"'The negro is not wholly without talents, but they are limited to imitation, — the learning of what has been previously known. He has neither invention nor judgment. Africans may be considered docile, but few of them are judicious, and thus in mental qualities we are disposed to see a certain analogy with the apes, whose imitative powers are proverbial.'" — Burmeister's Black Man, page 14.

Or how about this gem of common sense race science:

"So great a difference of opinion has ever existed upon the intrinsic value of the negro, that the very perplexity of the question is a proof that he is altogether a distinct variety. So long as it is generally considered that the negro and the white man are to be governed by the same laws and guided by the same management, so long will the former remain a thorn in the side of every community to which he may unhappily belong. When the horse and the ass shall be found to match in double harness, the white man and the African black will pull together under the same regime. It is the grand error of equalizing that which is unequal that has lowered the negro character, and made the black man a reproach." — Baker's Great Basin of the Nile, page 195.

People are complicated. One can be an abolitionist like Hinton Rowan Helper and believe that black humanity and personhood are sub-par, well below that of whites, and that African Americans have no place in American society. Ron Paul can be right on foreign relations and government waste for example, but dead wrong on matters of race, justice, and civil rights.

Such is life. Despite the temptations, there are no easy answers. Some in the American public will see Ron Paul's racism as necessarily compromising his vision, ethics, and judgement more generally; it is a first order problem, not a mere inconvenience. For Ron Paul's supporters, attitudes about black people are secondary to his libertarian vision for the United States. How a person reconciles this matter tells us a great deal about their own ethics and values.

On questions of race and justice the personal is indeed the political. The challenge here--and for libertarianism more broadly--is how these personal choices become impositions on the full citizenship, full rights, and full personhood of other people. To this point, Ron Paul's version of libertarianism offers no satisfying answers for those who are not White, not privileged, and outside of the moneyed classes.

Is he a racist? I do not know. But the policies which Ron Paul advocates, and the philosophy which he subscribes to, are none too friendly to people of color. For me, that is enough of a disqualification.

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